HI - I have recently converted from Poser to Daz Studio 4.8, but my renders, although nice looking, are taking a long time. I have heard others talk about using 'render farms' to somehow upload a scene to a third party with lots of processor power, and receive your finished render back from them a little while later. I have been reading around quite a bit, but I am unable to find any way of exporting a DS 4.8 scene in a format that would enable me to use a renderfarm - is there a way of doing this? (My Internet speed is great - I am a Virginmedia customer, with 150MB conection, soon to rise to 200MB)

I don't think it is integrated into the Daz Iray version as an option. Iray standalone itself is enabled just like the majority of other standalone render engines whether you could upload Daz files would be another story. Daz 4.9 has improved render times which is on the way. The Beta is available but you would need to decide if that is for you. I found it did knock a reasonable amount of time off a render.

Render Farms are not just a fixed thing. A render farm needs access to all the files used in the render. With a remote render farm, that involves sending all the files to the render computer. Some programs have built in things that make this easy and with others it's a matter of just sending all the files and the scene file with render instructions. Local render farms are a different story. There are internal and external programs for running a local render farm. What I have always found to be easiest is to set up all the assets on a drive that is called the same thing on all the computers in your home network. At that point you can just fire up the program, call up the scene file and start the render or you can use a program that controls a local render farm.

I don't know of any one running a commercial render farm for Daz Studio, I'm guessing it would involve just sending them the scene file along with all the files used in that scene. Basicly the same thing you would need to do if you wanted to go over to a friends house who had Daz and use their computer to render out an image. You might be able to do a wide area network over the internet, where your friends computer or the commercial render farm can access your drive directly. Then you get into security things.....

I'm not sure it would be that much help with still images. I've mostly just seen it implemented for animation. I did an animation last week that was a bit over 100 hours. With 2 computers it would have been a little over 50 hours and with 4 computers it would have been a little over 25 hours. If you have more then one computer at home you can simply set up all your Daz stuff on a networked drive (always liked labeling networked drives starting with Z and going down) and fire us a copy of Studio on that computer, load the scene, start the render and go back to the other computer and work on other stuff.

Could be something you may see in DS at some point in the future, have you seen this in the Render settings.

Thanks Roboman - I guess I kinda thought that to be the case, after a little reading, but thought it was worth asking - you don't know the "unknown unknowns", as Donald Rumsfeld said... thanks for the reply anyway. Razor42 - I am guessing that is part of the Daz 4.9 beta setup? Looks promising (though I can't figure out how they will do it - will they need to have every piece of DS content, including third-party stuff installed on their render farms? or is that why the whole 'Cloud content' thing is coming in?

The screenshot is actually in 4.8 i dont have any specifics tbh just noticed it today while i was looking throuh render setting.

Ya, interesting. Guess an internet render farm might be worth it for a really large still image. Render farms really are great with animation. Daz seems to have a hard time getting people to use the program for animation. It does have some nice animation tools. lip sync/Mimic and AniMate2 are very nice. Movie Maker also looks good. I guess with out a modeler it's hard to look at it as an animation tool or maybe it's just that historically it's been a program for stills.